The world’s Amphibians are in the grips of the worst extinction crisis this planet has seen since the dinosaurs were wiped out. It's a catastrophe that will reverberate through the entire web of life yet it fails to grab headlines like pandas or polar bears. This blog is dedicated to the ugly, the freakish and the unloved animals that are perilously ignored thanks to the tyranny of cute.

05/01/2010

2010: a frog odyssey

The Avenger joins the smoky jungle frog on board the spaceship EVACC

My amphibian adventure is about to go totally sci-fi. I’m
going to witness the future of frog-kind and it’s like the plot of a bad B movie;
featuring other-worldly amphibians, a space age frog pod, a killer fungus and a bunch of fiendish smugglers with frogs up their bums.

This post has got it all, including alien frog sex (complete with kamikaze flies)

I’m in Panama, which is quite a shock after Colombia’s
raw Latino charm. First up they use US dollars as their currency, which is a
bit of an eye opener. The drive from the airport reveals a capital city with a
skyline straight out of Miami Vice. I’m told by my taxi driver, who speaks to
me in perfect American, that Panama city aspires to be the Dubai of Central
America. Oh. Dear. I hated Dubai. A city of transitory superlatives, full of
wanton souls acting out hollow lives in a Disneyland of western consumption. My
heart sinks.

The buses in Panama are cool, in a sweaty way

I’m plopped out of the cab into some bland suburb of pastel
coloured high-rise condos resplendent with gun-toting door men. My hostel is an
ugly modern house with what looks like an ashtray for a garden, just around the
corner from a 4-lane highway and a supermarket the size of an airport. I feel a
long way from the frogs.

But I’m not hanging about. I’m heading into the Panamanian highlands on a mission to visit EVACC – a space age amphibian evacuation centre nestled in the heart of an extinct volcanic crater.

EVACC: A terrifying vision of the future where frogs survive in sterile pods and crocs are mandatory footwear.

It all sounds very Moonraker, so I’m half expecting Jaws and
his pigtailed girlfriend to greet me off the bus. Instead, I’m met by the very
wonderful Edgardo Griffith and his lovely wife Heidi - the original frog Samaritans.

Edgardo checks on his babies - each tank has temperature, light, moisture and ph monitored to suit the frog's needs.

Back in 2004 the deadly Chytrid fungus was steadily creeping south through Central America, killing thousands of frogs. Aware of what would happen when it hit Panama a team of pioneering frog scientists hatched a controversial plan to conduct the world’s first frog swoop. The idea was to mount a massive rescue operation to scoop up enough specimens ahead of the advancing fungal wave to create an amphibian ark.

The El Valle Amphibian Conservation Centre now supports over fifteen utterly unique species which thanks to the fungus, can no longer live outside this sterilised building. One of the key species they wanted to save was the awesome golden frog.

The rather poorly named golden frog is neither gold nor a
frog but a terribly polite yellow toad, which likes to wave at other yellow
toads it sees down by the stream. The theory is that streams are noisy places
and the waving beats croaking over the din of running water in order to get
laid or pick a fight. You can watch the absurdly hilarious sight of toad semaphore
in the Attenborough clip below. It's brilliant.

Somewhat ironically for an animal that’s now extinct in the wild, the golden frog has always been a symbol of good luck. It’s the countries number one national treasure – the Panamanian equivalent of the panda. Rather like the Queen, the golden frog can be found looking mildly annoyed and waving at you from stamps, tea towels and other tourist trinkets.

Love the car - Edgardo and Heidi drive a golden frog rana-mobile...not sure if it waves politely but it's perfect for the Avenger

..they even have a rana-loo. Just the place to have a lucky poo.

But fame has been this frog’s final undoing. Any golden frogs that survived the fungus were swiped from streams by illegal frog nappers and sold to fanatic collectors for up to $5000 a pair.

The illegal trade in frogs is a booming multi-million dollar industry that's making a significant dent in wild populations of many rare amphibians. For some strange reason amphibians have no official status and are lumped together with fish - a small legal detail which makes them easy to smuggle through customs amongst cargo of tropical fish.

Proving that even evolution makes mistakes - these Colombian dart frogs have inadvertently evolved a facsimile of the Japanese flag in their backs, making them highly sort after by Japanese collectors.

My sources tell me they’ve even heard of small time smugglers adopting an altogether kinkier approach - strapping frogs to their thighs or sticking them in tubes and smuggling them through customs up their bums. All of which makes you wonder how one would explain away a
severe case of croaking or deal with an escapee poison dart frog heading north. It seems hard to believe.

But it's true. Earlier this year Hans Kurt Kubus was busted in New Zealand with no less than 44 lizards in his pants. And one very frightened trouser snake.

Conforming perfectly to national stereotypes, the dons of the frog smuggling world are in fact the Germans whose desire to be the first at everything even extends to frog collecting. Many of the world’s rarest amphibians end up being traded under the table at a
huge herpetology fair in Germany, which is presumably crawling with Teutonic types with with herps in their pants.

Edgardo takes me on a hike to explore the cloud forests surrounding El Valle.
They look like a fantasyland for frogs, full of crystal clear streams and huge trees
dripping with moss and bromeliads. But it's eerily silent – we hear just the one solitary frog calling during our walk.
He tells me that the fungus wiped out 80% of the hundred or so species found here, many of which were found nowhere else on earth.

These frogs will not be able to return to their natural home until some clever scientist finds a cure for Chytrid. In the meantime the food chain is responding to the missing frogs - zoologists have already recorded the disappearance of some species of amphibian-eating snakes.

The forest of El Valle looks completely normal but is strangely silent

But there will be no point in finding a cure for the fungus if the cloud forests no longer exist. In a bizarre final twist to this
story, the frogs are being replaced by another animal waiting to croak - US
retirees. The Panamanian highlands are being sold off as a cheap place for
Americans waiting to die - with acres of cloud forest being destroyed to create gated
developments and golf courses. A sterilised version of nature suitable for American pensioners.

The frogs at EVACC are extremely pampered - katydids have their powerful mandibles and spiky feet removed so they can't cause any damage when being hand fed to the frogs

There is no denying that EVACC is a similarly strange place for frogs - a vision of a future where frogs exist only in sterile life support machines. But without Edgar and Heidi and EVACC these animals wouldn't
exist at all.

I feel incredibly privileged to be able to
hang out at EVACC. In fact I've chosen to spend my birthday cleaning poop out of tanks and feeding the frogs so that I can spend some quality time watching these amazing animals.

A juvenile Hemiphractus fasciatus, born at the centre

But my best birthday present is the arrival of a
freshly metamorphosed golden froglet, which will share my birthday and is named
after me. I am super chuffed for so many reasons.

Lucy's birthday golden frog

EVACC may not look like a cloud forest but Heidi and Edgardo's extraordinary efforts to mimic nature in a plastic tank are clearly paying off. The frogs are not just surviving, but breeding like crazy. If all of EVACC’s bumper crop of golden
frog tadpoles turn into toads they won’t know what to do with them all.

Which makes me wonder if Edgar and Heidi were allowed to sell off the spare frogs then perhaps they could help fund their conservation. And perhaps even prevent them from being stuck up German's bums. Well maybe.

Great recount, Lucy!! I can't think of a better way to spend one's birthday; and to have a toadlet named after you no less! In a few days I will be contributing my own time to more local amphibian conservation; helping some Nevada State biologists recover some
tagged endangered toads for study and finding new individuals for their mark and recapture program. These will be the Amargosa toad
(Anaxyrus nelsoni).